posted August 08, 2015 08:07 PM
As I fell asleep I was instantly a little girl again in a dream with my older cousin Zack the appropriate age for my age and also with a friend I used to have named Debbie I had back then (hadn't known each other long yet) and Granny and my 'rents were in it at first. There was a birthday going on but now I can't remember whose and for whatever reason we ended up in a hospital, not injured but were visiting someone.For some reason me and my friend Debbie went down the elevator and it went down frighteningly fast and then paused a long time before the door opened into a hospital floor with only a dim light that we knew wasn't the right hospital. I said we should go back up but Debbie had to explore (she can be such a Scorpio and if she SHOULDN'T explore then she'd want to, otherwise she'd probably be bored) despite my saying we should go back but when she got off I got off with her.
This part of the dream is fuzzy in my memory now but long story short people here were taller, stronger, and just different, even the smell of the world was all strange, and the humans had a very strange way of carrying themselves, very "assertive" for want of a better world that contrasted greatly with my friend and even myself who was more laid back. And the humans (who were hospital staff, but with a "military presence" for want of a better word) knew there was something wrong with us as well and didn't ignore children the way adults in this world often do. (We didn't even get to leave this hospital.)
The adults came after us, not in some exactly aggressive way but still a no-nonsense way that brooked no insolence and my friend and I ran was we tried to get back to the elevator (we hadn't even made it outside yet) and I think a bit of me flashed back to when I was in that mental hospital as a kid because I got extremely afraid which these days means extremely angry and also a very capable fighter as an adult (probably that work I did using self-hypnosis so that the nightmares in which I was a kid operating on the realities of a helpless child became adult in nature, very helpful once it started working...too bad the pyrokinesis which seems to be a side-effect of my self-hypnosis to deal with my fire dreams didn't kick in right then...) while my friend pretty much just cried as someone her age (and she herself would).
I didn't last long but being in a hospital I did grab some syringes, filled them with cleaning chemicals, and injected them into the legs of the biggest adult as I slipped between his legs (at that moment, I had the best of both worlds, the small size and speed of a kid with the skill of an adult and not being feeling helpless before adults as a kid often is even if I did feel threatened) but after they adjusted for me they quickly took me down.
I woke up strapped to a table surrounded by adults (hospital staff) interrogating me. They knew about the elevator now (they'd done a search for anymore "lost children" and found it somehow) and though it seemed ordinary they had just called in some techs who managed to find this "other hospital" and knew that I was of this other world.
They casually told me my friend was dead as she was "flawed" who could only cry and not fight back, and cowardly and selfish, and they'd probably do the same to me and yet I'd shown resourcefulness and killed an adult of theirs...and this was said with grudging admiration rather than anger or disgust. Yet they did finally seem disgusted when I was given food which included bloody chunks of raw meat and I was obviously was disgusted by it and warned that my friend was killed because she was weak, flawed, and my only hope for long term survival was to show I was indeed worthy to stand among them.
So I grudgingly ate and I again showed adult sensibilities all of a sudden as I said the diet is why they smelled different and a woman said that's true, I smelled weird to them, and diet had a lot to do with it but wasn't the entire story.
Summing it up now what I learned is that in this alternate world started off about the same as ours but Genghis Khan didn't die as he did on my world and his successes were followed up on so that Christian Europe fell to the Mongols (as they would've), but the Swedes and Normans did not retreating to Scandinavia and what is the UK today and seeing the failure of Christianity to stop the Horde returned to the Old Gods of war and blood, and being fishermen in Scandinavia (which would later become a major empire reaching far into Russia) they learned to eat meat a lot more, especially as at first many were pushed to the arctic extremes by the Mongols and their slave armies and even on the temperate islands the Horde would destroy crops to make them weak to soften them for future invasion, and that began centuries of intense warfare between the Mongols and the Vikings (simply put) in which the Vikings ruled at sea and Mongols at land yet neither was restricted to one or the other. Both adapted their tactics and technology, and sought to develop technology which they did faster than ours, but this also includes the use of plants (poisoned arrows were a favorite, first by the Mongols and then by their enemies) and medicine (initially meant to study and counter poisons) also came into being faster as a result. (Heck, maybe this was advanced to begin with to help explain why Genghis Khan lived a lot longer on their world!)
Meanwhile, the Mongols totally kicked China's butt even more than they did in our timeline and many of the Chinese fled across the sea to various lands that included Australia and Central America, and with them they took the secrets of gunpowder for which they harnessed to both fight the natives and to one day reclaim the homeland of their ancestors (which waited for them). Only they ended up mixing with natives more and more and by the time the Vikings came to Central America they pretty much found themselves facing Aztecs who had incorporated knowledge of Chinese medicine (more advanced than on our world) and martial arts along with advanced firearms!
Also, due to advances in medicine the white man did not bring the plagues that were genocidal of the American natives in of itself as happened in our own history which made them all the more formidable than they'd been in our world even before taking the other changes into account.
Munitions came into being which is what spurred industrialization, and it wasn't capitalism but military might/arms race that was the driving goal, because the reality obvious to everyone is that you needed power as that decided if you were free or a slave, or even living or dead, and weakness was not tolerated. Yet the fighting between individuals and the strongest and most skilled against their competitors ended up inspiring more sophisticated systems that ultimately worked out a lot like communism and proved to bolster the groups enough that those who adopted it usually did better against the other major military societies in which their best and strongest kept fighting and killing each other (and also competing in a Darwinian struggle meant to weed out their weakest members) so that this (like everything else that worked) spread.
North America did become a melting pot again as Vikings settled on one side and Mongols on the other with the Chinese and their ability to create alliances among the natives (those that refused to deal, such as the Comanche, were exterminated, so no Comanche in their world as in ours, but many tribes not in ours had their own states in this other world allied with the others). End result was that the world was roughly divided between Australia & South Pacific, Eurasia (though about half of Russia belonged with Scandinavia, but the UK was lost to the Mongols, yet there was also a lot of race mixing) and the Americas (also divided into different states and regions yet sharing common enemies).
Religion evolved different (and many did away with the concept but it was tolerated as long as it aided and not hindered the war efforts) and generally included that God was testing all of us to see who was worthy of surviving with Him and who was worthy of being eaten for eternity (grown back to feed the other worthy souls over and over again), a very brutal concept of God and the afterlife in which spirituality was determined by courage and victory (even more than obedience to orders, interesting enough, though if you defied authority to do something else then it had better work!)
A lot of technology that we had simply wasn't invented (at least not as well), they didn't have capitalism or the number of engineers that we had and flying machines could be shot down from the ground a lot easier than flown, though they did exist, but primitive and almost strictly for military purposes (as in shuttling military personnel and equipment around). Submarines was what they focused on as they were downright scary so that coastal cities were rarer (but still necessary and considered "front lines").
Yet the medicine had continued to advance so that they began tinkering with the genome over a century ago and since humanity had ended up adapting more and more to a meat eating diet AND it was noticed that meat eaters tended to be bigger (an advantage in a military society) this was honed even more so that by the time I showed up they eat bloody chunks of raw meat, as did children who were raised to be military. Furthermore, breeding was not romantic or haphazard, one thing they were baffled by our world is that we put more thought in breeding our pets than we do our own species!
(There was nothing racial about this, so many rapes had happened between all sides, including of favored slaves, that the features were no longer indicative of any one faction, another reason why me and my white friend stood out in that hospital) and as for the lights being dimmer that was both to conserve energy and also because their genome improved their eyesight (such modification was more tweaking than granting super powers, though lifespans were more than twice ours, but mortality was, of course, high, and some tinkering with the genome had accidentally created some that could only digest blood and yet they found a place for them in their armies).
As for the world I had come from, initial reports painted my world as soft, decadent, and frankly insane (of course their world was madness to me and a great tragedy) but in their short time on my world they'd witnessed enough TV and cinema (things this world did not have and this gobsmacked them, they thought it was a terrible thing and why my world was filled with people mentally and physically weak and lazy, unfit to live) in which vampires and such featured that they figured our world instinctively knew they had veered off the path of their destiny and were blindly seeking some way to claim it, and that we were a jaded society forever in search of a good time that was backsliding under its own decadence that if the military world were to invade our world they felt that despite some superior military technology that our world would collapse under its own weight. We were essentially spoiled children that never grew up in their eyes, just simply got old and died, an utter waste of flesh.
The question is did they want to? We had resources and technology they could use but frankly our ways frightened them and didn't want the ideas of my world infecting their society which was now a collection of well oiled collectivist military societies and if our ideas and ways "infected" them then they'd fall to their enemies. Nearly all their agents had been recalled and they were going to learn more about the world through me, though I was but a child.
The fact that I'd fought back and killed an adult made them think I was salvageable to them and might find a place in their society but I'd never be allowed to return...and I'd have to learn to love the taste of raw, bloody meat (which their doctors would help me with, one thing their society did was "help weakened children become strong" which included retro-viral genetic reprogramming and thus it was still possible to save me so that I wasn't put down like an ailing pet the way my friend had been). They'd decide what to do with me--and my world--later, and I was as much of a lab rat as I was a patient.
And as I lay on my hospital bed trying to think how to get to the elevator to escape I woke up...very grateful to be back in this world.
Lindaland
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posted August 08, 2015 07:44 PM
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posted August 14, 2015 03:44 AM
